A Guide to Knowing More than Recommended
by Captain Cattywampus
Summary: "A bit of advice, I guess: knowing A Future and A Past doesn't necessarily mean you know This Future or This Past. The multiverse is multitudes, my dude. Your best bet is to rush in acting like you know nothing, and keep the something you do know tucked in your back pocket. Like bar trivia." OR "How to survive as Dipper and Mabel Pines' big sister." Reincarnation style SIOC


_Prologue_ : RIP in Pieces

Here's the deal:

I had never been particularly remarkable, before, despite what Mr. Rodgers might say. I was a stereotypical Millennial, recently graduated from a good, four-year university, and I'd been working at a certain overpriced coffee shop until I could finally get a job related to my degree. I had had parents. I'd had siblings. I'd had a few good friends, and some friendly acquaintances. I hadn't had a partner or spouse, but hadn't been particularly concerned about that, because of course I had all the time in the world for that. I'd had hobbies, like writing and video games and billiards. I'd liked to end my day binging TV shows in my underwear.

And then I died.

Yeah, that's a thing. I died. It wasn't expected. It wasn't like a TV show. I didn't lose a fight with cancer. I didn't go down swinging, protecting someone I cared about. My camera-ready corpse probably wasn't found and held by someone who loved me. I, well, usually you don't think the front driver's side tire of your car is going to bust off and send the whole thing rolling off the interstate, but when it does? My dude, you are screwed.

Like I said, I wasn't particularly remarkable.

What happened after, however, was weird. Humans have always been a bit touchy about the whole "What happens after we die?" question. Some people believe that their consciousness is transported to another plane of existence, to exist in perpetuity until the end of time. Some people believe that we cease to exist, that everything that made us us just rots away with our flesh. Some people believe that we keep existing in this world, just in different forms, our life force recycled over and over and over. All I know is what I've seen for myself.

I was reborn. Reincarnated, I guess. A cut to white, and then I was very suddenly an actual factual infant, and it was terrifying. Some dingus in the liminal state between death and undeath must have dropped the ball, forgot the very, very important step of snipping off whatever metaphysical concept kept my 22 years of previous life experience tethered to whatever it is that makes a person exist, and as a result I remembered. I remembered far too much. A baby's brain just isn't wired for memories of college lectures, or how to drive, or any sort of long term memory that isn't directly related to, say, language development or how to breathe without choking.

So things came in, waxing and abruptly waning. My brain was like a Pythagorean cup; it'd fill up, up, up, just a little more until, whoops! That was too much! The whole thing sloshes out into your lap and you sit there looking like a complete idiot. I was constantly alternating between being the me that had existed, that idiot suspended in the flipping vehicle, and the cute blank slate that I was supposed to be. It hit an equilibrium, eventually. Now if you tried to separate out where the two ended or began, you'd be hard pressed, but for the first few months? Hoo, boy, my new parents were saints for not asking for a return on their obviously defective bundle of joy.

Basically, I cried. I screamed. I absolutely positively bawled out of frustration, and confusion, and fear all the time.

And to my ears? All that racket was muffled and distant, like it was happening on the other side of a thick brick wall.

At first, I thought it was normal for babies to not have all their hearing up and running when they first come out, because that sure as hell was the case with other things, like eyesight and bowel control and the ability to have an even heart rate. That wasn't the case. A month into my second existence, my mom and dad had my hearing tested, and I was found to have severe hearing loss.

Have you ever seen a baby with hearing aids? Because that's what I was. They didn't completely fix everything; there are some sounds I just can't hear no matter what and people who don't face me when they're talking are a constant annoyance because it makes it that much harder to understand them. Also, my greatest fear was coming out of one of my brainless infant episodes to find that I'd swallowed one of my aids. That actually almost happened, once.

Things weren't all bad, though. Having prior experience in English meant I picked it right back up as quick as my brain would let me, even if I did have to take speech therapy for slurring. Mom and Dad took classes in ASL when they weren't working, and signed me up for a daycare and preschool for deaf and hard of hearing kids, so I ended up signing at home as often as I spoke verbally. Eventually even my younger siblings picked up enough sign that I could sometimes forgo wearing my aids or lip reading for entire weekends.

And, right, younger siblings. That's when things actually got complicated. Having siblings wasn't a new thing for me, I'd had a little sister and two big brothers before, and I was sure I could handle being the oldest this time around. But with the new kids came the last big revelation of exactly what my life was going to be like.

It's like this: somehow Mom and Dad got it in their heads to have another kid when I was about four. The pregnancy that had resulted in me had been troubled, and they had had miscarriages before, but they were optimistic. At that point, the family that I knew had been rather small; Mom, or Lana, was an only, adopted child to a headstrong divorcée, and Baba Masha was far too busy translating theological texts written in very obscure dialects of Old High German to be around much. Baba Masha sent lots of gifts to make up for her absence, which didn't leave much of an impression other than confirming her existence and her love of strange straw dolls. Dad, or Isaak, was also an only child, but Grandpa Sherman only lived an hour up the highway, so Saturdays tended to be spent in the company of a bald old man who thought bow ties and suspenders were excellent casual wear, building towering towers with thick wooden blocks and, when those ran out, VHS tapes. I even met Grandpa Sherman's mother, Ruth, a grand total of once before she died. She'd been bedridden in the hospital at the time, but somehow managed to smell strongly of hairspray and cigarettes, and I was a three year old who accidentally sent her into a coughing fit by proclaiming that if she was Ruth, and I was Ruth, then if one left the room it'd be a Ruth-less

I'm a comedic genius, I know.

Point is, our family was small, and I think for whatever reason Mom and Dad weren't entirely comfortable with that.

So, they got to talking about having another kid. They decided on names pretty quickly, with Mason for a boy and Mabel for a girl. Mason Pines or Mabel Pines, and when that 'or' turned into more of an 'and' with the discovery that Mom was carrying a set of opposite sex twins, things were set.

Now, from an outside point of view, figuring out The Big Revelation should have been as easy as taking a quick look around and thinking, "Ah, yes, our last name is Pines. We live in Piedmont, California. I'm going to have a sister named Mabel, and my brother's name is gonna be an obvious reference to the Freemasons. Their expected due date is the end of the summer. My grandfather's name is Sherman. Seems like I could pull a certain conclusion from this information, possibly concerning a town in Oregon called Gravity Falls."

When you're on the ground level, though, you don't think about all the cartoons you watched or the fanfictions you read a literal lifetime ago. I was just trying to sneak watching reruns of the X-Files or figure out how to act like a normal little kid so as not to worry my parents, not solve the mystery of whether or not I was in a full on _Dreaming of Sunshine_ situation.

How I finally figured things out wasn't like you'd expect. You'd expect that my parents would bring my new little siblings home, I'd see the very obvious Big Dipper birthmark on my brother's forehead, and promptly realize that I had very much not been reborn into the same universe I'd died in, and that this universe was one I'd looked in on through my TV far too many times to count.

That's not how it went down. What really brought everything to a head was a cranky old man in a tacky Hawaiian shirt.

Because until the twins were born, I hadn't ever met Grunkle Stan.

And, if I'm completely honest, that's where this story really starts.

* * *

a/n: well, my dudes, i came into the gf section looking for a reincarnation style sioc fic, and when i found none i realized that if you want a fic, sometimes you've gotta write it yourself. granted, i had that realization months ago and that ended with me drafting literal piles of notes but like

Whatever.

im super rusty with fic writing, so any comments concerning formatting or how the main character should stop rambling endlessly would be defs appreciated, bc this prologue turned into just a pile of exposition

the actual first chapter will be different in tone i promise

 ** _Next time_** : Z hglib'h hgzig xzm yv jfrgv szrib, vhkvxrzoob dsvm blf pmld nliv gszm blf hslfow yfg ovhh gszg blf xlfow.


End file.
